I completed it and has great up to date information for educators. I enjoyed working collaboratively with educators across Australia utilising Google docs. It’s free as well.

Here is some further info:

Who should take this course?

Anyone interested in learning about Australian educational copyright, copyright compliance strategies, and open educational resources (OER).

What will I learn?

This course will equip you with the copyright knowledge to confidently use copyright material in the classroom. It will also introduce OER and teach you how to find and adapt free, useful resources for your classes.

What won’t I learn?

This course will not cover law outside of Australian copyright law, and it only gives an introduction to OER. But the School of Open does offer other courses that cover beyond what this course does!

What is the time commitment?

The course runs for seven weeks, as split up to the left and below. Each week has a different task to complete, which is due the following Sunday. Tasks may take anywhere from half an hour to three hours or more, depending on how much effort you and your group wants to put in that week. Like most things in life- the more time you put into it, the more you will get out of it.

Course Breakdown

Week 1 – May 4: Welcome to the course!

Week 2 – May 11: Group meet and greet

Week 3 – May 18: Copyright basics

Week 4 – May 25: Statutory Licences

Week 5 – June 1: Copyright Exceptions

Week 6 – June 8: OER

Week 7 – June 15: Law reform

How is the course delivered?

The Copyright 4 Educators course is not taught, it is facilitated by the course leaders (Delia, Praveen and Jessica). You will complete the weekly tasks with your group, and we will review your answers and leave feedback.

This is a peer to peer learning experience, so it does require you to interact with your specific group to complete assignments as well as with the other groups taking the course by reviewing their answers to assignments. There will be a maximum of 60 students divided into groups of four.

Group Assignments

For each task that requires a group answer (weeks 3-7), each group has two responsibilities:

reviewing two other groups’ answers and leaving feedback. See the “Communicating in this course” page to the left for more info on how to do this.

Each week has a list of readings that will assist you in the tasks. It also has a list of keywords indicating the topics the week is intended to cover. Focusing on those topics only when answering the questions will greatly reduce the time you spend on each task.

You are only responsible for answering the task questions. You are more than welcome to answer the ‘questions for understanding’, but please do not post these to the google doc. If you’d like some help/feedback on your answers for the discussion questions then just let us know via email and we’d be more than happy to help.

Badges

During this course you are eligible for 4 different badges – one for each substantive topic that we cover in weeks 3 through 6 – copyright basics, statutory licences, copyright exceptions, and OER basics. We will also award certificates via email to all those who successfully complete the entire course. Each badge is located to the left as well as under the ‘Content’ tab. You can learn more about badges HERE and you can also go directly into our specific badges to learn more and apply for each badge as you complete those weeks. Let us know if you have any questions!

How to get started

Enrollments for the course open on April 27. To enroll simply click ‘Start course’ at the bottom left under the menu. After you enroll, you should see yourself under the ‘People’ tab.

After enrolling in this course, the first thing you should do is go ahead to Week 1. Week 1 is the only week you will be working on your own. This is also one of the only weeks that you will not need to review the work of your peers (although please do say hello, why you chose to take this course and/or anything else on the course discussion board if you so feel like it!).

After Week 1, we’ll put everyone into groups of four. In Week 2, your task will be to contact your group members and introduce yourself. From there you’ll work your way through the weeks according to the dates listed above.

I enjoyed the course, even though it was a bit tricky to get going and the info quite technical, I took away from it what was relevant for me and the age of students I work with.